Making faces: Interferences between Plastic Arts and Makeup

Abstract

For years,  I have developed an investigation that has been focused on the body: an editable body, capable of transmutation. This game of creating possible characters is developed using just make-up, implants or masks that provide the individual other interpretations and meanings. 

In 2018, I decide to study in a professional school of make-up and characterisation.  This helped me understand the technique in a deeper way, which expanded the creative possibilities.  Such training offered me the opportunity to work in other fields such as fashion, editorial photography or publicity. In these professional fields I could recognise some interferences among make-up works that were being made in the current fashion world and the images and ideas that I had about artistic references that I had worked before.

The images that we can find in the present beauty industry seem to have a poetic/aesthetic discourse that makes it difficult to discern an outline, if existent at all, between plastic/visual  arts and the commercial image of a Beauty.

The beauty industry has been ruled for years in a canonic plan, not opened to other views. However, just like the avant-garde artists wondered at some point “What is art?”, or in the 70s fashion begins to reinterpret the functionality and the shape of the patterns, make-up artists and the industry of fashion are now wondering “What is beauty?”, materializing a concept that is expanded and goes beyond an aesthetic purpose: make-up as a mere artistic expression.

The recent exhibition by Gina Beavers “Face Painting” at MoMa (New York), the number of visual artists that enter the makeup world -such as Peter Philips, Isamaya French or Pat McGrath-, and the huge number of publications devoted to this artistic technique such as LyLe Xox’s “Head of Design”, make necessary the recognition through an investigation that reflects and gathers together the role of make-up in the present day, the role of the Make-Up Artist and the connection of both with visual arts.

In this photo-essay, we will illustrate with examples some of the interferences found during the investigation. On some occasions these connections are simply aesthetic connections, others are conceptuals, others are found on a technical level.  In other cases we can find a complete reflection in regard to a concept that had already been created by visual artists through history. In this photo-essay we expect to dissolve time and the artistic movements in a universal space of references where all of them are interconnected. In this case, we can only find a small representation of the investigation, that as a kind of game makes us enter in the world of make-up in the present day.